Tag: Futurism

A music album called IAMAI, which released on August 21st, is the first that’s entirely composed by an artificial intelligence.

A New Kind of Composer

“Break Free” is the first sone released in a new album by Taryn Southern. The song, indeed, the entire album, features an artist known as Amper—but what looks like a typical collaboration between artists is actually much more than that.

Taryn is no stranger to the music and entertainment industry. She is a singer and digital storyteller who has amassed more than 500 million views on YouTube, and she has over 450 thousand subscribers. On the other hand, Amper is making his debut…except he’s (it’s?) not a person.

Amper is an artificially intelligent music composer, producer, and performer. The AI was developed by a team of professional musicians and technology experts, and it’s the the very first AI to compose and produced an entire music album. The album is called I AM AI, and the featured single is set to release on August 21, 2017.

Check out the song “Break Free” in the video below:

As film composer Drew Silverstein, one of Amper’s founders, explained to TechCrunch, Amper isn’t meant to act totally on its own, but was designed specifically to work in collaboration with human musicians: “One of our core beliefs as a company is that the future of music is going to be created in the collaboration between humans and AI. We want that collaborative experience to propel the creative process forward.”

That said, the team notes that, contrary to the other songs that have been released by AI composers, the chord structures and instrumentation of “Break Free” are entirely the work of Amper’s AI.

Not Just Music Production

Ultimately, Amper breaks the model followed by today’s music-making AIs. Usually, the original work done by the AI is largely reinterpreted by humans. This means that humans are really doing most of the legwork. As the team notes in their press release, “the process of releasing AI music has involved humans making signiﬁcant manual changes—including alteration to chords and melodies—to the AI notation.”

That’s not the case with Amper. As previously noted, the chord structures and instrumentation is purely Amper’s; it just works with manual inputs from the human artist when it comes to style and overall rhythm.

Unlike typical flying car concepts, the Pop.Up features a modular set-up that will allow it to operate both on ground and in the air. A drivable passenger capsule, about the size of a smart car, can attach to a giant quadcopter that will lift it into the air, giving passengers the option to travel through the traffic or above it.

The plan is for the Pop.Up to be controlled by Artificial Intelligence so that passengers can summon the vehicle on demand via an app. Airbus sees this as the most efficient way to ferry passengers. It would also the first fully electric, zero-emission vehicle system designed specifically to relieve traffic congestion, which is expected to increase by 2030.

This vehicle is design to meet the needs of the future, explained Italdesign CEO Jörg Astalosch in a press release.

“Today, automobiles are part of a much wider eco-system: if you want to design the urban vehicle of the future, the traditional car cannot alone be the solution for megacities,” Astalosch said. “In the next years ground transportation will move to the next level and from being shared, connected and autonomous it will also go multimodal and moving into the third dimension.”

While the Pop.Up is still in the concept stage, Italdesign and Airbus argue that it is the most feasible concept car to date. If the companies’s hopes come to fruition, it won’t be long before we see their vehicle on our roads and in the skies.